4/19/2014

[UPDATE: See updates below. This has clearly happened to thousands and thousands of people today. — P]

This morning I noticed a couple of odd tweets in my Twitter stream. One was from Charles C. Johnson:

Hm. That doesn’t sound like something he’d say. Then there was this:

Simon Dodd is someone who likes to blog about his admiration for Antonin Scalia. Not the sort of fella you’d think would be hawking some diet product — which is what the link turned out to be. It was, unsurprisingly, a link to the same page that Chuck’s was. I DM’d Chuck to ask if he had been hacked, and he said he had.

It’s not over. Now we have the president of FIRE, an excellent organization supporting free speech on campus:

And then Rob Long:

Rob made it clear what he thinks is going on:

It seems to me that several people have been hacked on the same day — and it’s possible that, as Rob says, Twitter itself has been hacked. I can’t seem to find a news story about it, but this is too much to be a coincidence. If you see other suspicious tweets today, link them below and ideally screenshot them.

UPDATE: More:

UPDATE: Still more:

I just did a Twitter search for “fruit” which revealed dozens and dozens of Tweets in the last five minutes about the amazing weight-loss fruit. This is an epidemic and I predict it will be all over the Internet news by tonight. You saw it here first.

UPDATE: If you scroll down that Twitter fruit search, my guess is that thousands of accounts have been hacked.

23 Responses to “Twitter Hacked?”

This comes so soon after the news of the Heartbleed bug that I suspect Twitter was too slow to update their OpenSSL installation, and got people’s passwords (and potentially other sensitive information) leaked.

I’d recommend that everyone change their Twitter password now, and any other sites where you might be using the same password, if you haven’t already done so.

happyfeet, fruit does make you lose weight, but there’s a secret. You have to buy it fresh every day, you cannot buy it from any store closer than one mile to where you live, and you must walk there and back. Otherwise, the fruit does not retain its magical properties. Don’t ask me why. The Way of the Great Wheel is a mystery.

Two tweets went out from “me” that I didn’t write. Although I normally tweet about health, those tweets about garcina and weight loss and Dr. Oz were definitely not written by me. One of the links (no I probably shouldn’t have clicked on it, but I was worried about what other people would think I was linking them to.) it just went to a page full of Chinese (?) characters. I’m at least relieved I’m not the only one affected by this.

My current account was just fine when I looked, but I saw a reference to an old account I had forgotten about. THAT account was well and truly hacked — the language was set to Russian. I reset the password and deleted the account since I don’t use it anymore.

It’s probably because twitter being a brief form of communication, pinging their servers would likely net a lot of sign ons and messages.

Plus it so quick that a lot of people instantly changed their passwords or checked their passwords and all that stuff was available to skim.

WAIT UNTIL YOU KNOW THEY’VE PATCHED THEIR SITE.

Before changing your password. Otherwise you’re just making it MORE likely that they will skim your data. Remember they don’t skim stored information only what’s in RAM and that turns over fairly quickly.

Comment #19 by jakee308 is entirely correct, and bears repeating. The Heartbleed bug exposes recent server activity (any data that’s still in RAM and hasn’t yet been overwritten by newer data). This means that changing your password on a server that hasn’t yet been fixed will expose your new password. WAIT until the server has been updated to the latest version of OpenSSL (the server admins should announce such on their website, or their “about our company” blog, or their Twitter feed), and only then should you update your password.

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